Art And Race...


Selene

Recommended Posts

This caught my eye in my Open Culture e-mail this morning. Charles Schultz, as his wife noted, that when he "...taught Sunday school, he would never tell people what to believe. God was very important to him, but in a very deep way, in a very mysterious way.[62] His now famous special almost did not make it to the air in 1965.

Few headlines about network television make me giddy. Fewer still make me hopeful that all is good in the world. But back in August of 2010, I read the following headline from the media pages with great excitement: “Charlie Brown Is Here to Stay: ABC Picks Up ‘Peanuts’ Specials Through 2015.” The first of these to be made, the famous Christmas special, was an instant classic when it was created by Charles Schulz on a shoestring budget back in 1965, and thanks to some smart television executives, it will be around for at least another five years for all of us to see and enjoy.Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/284093/gospel-according-peanuts-lee-habeeb
However, it almost did not happen, Schultz had to go all Ayn Rand on them:
What people don’t know is that the Christmas special almost didn’t happen, because some not-so-smart television executives almost didn’t let it air. You see, Charles Schulz had some ideas that challenged the way of thinking of those executives 46 years ago, and one of them had to do with the inclusion in his Christmas cartoon of a reading from the King James Bible’s version of the Gospel of Luke. Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/284093/gospel-according-peanuts-lee-habeeb
Great little story. A Presbyterian minister wrote the Gospel According to Peanuts, wherein Schultz's genius was analyzed thru a Christian "window:"
The Gospel According to Peanuts is a best-selling 1965 book written by Presbyterian minister Robert L. Short about Charles M. Schulz's popular comic strip, Peanuts. The book is based on Short's use of the Peanuts characters to illustrate his lectures about the Christian Gospel. The book was a best seller and sold over 10 million copies.[1] Summary:“ While Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus, and the rest of the Peanuts gang have enjoyed the kind of success most cartoon characters can only dream about –– becoming pop culture icons of the highest order and entering the global consciousness practically as family members –– Robert Short's The Gospel According to Peanuts also has found a place in the hearts of many readers....[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gospel_According_to_Peanuts I found it interesting how the first black member of the Peanuts script arrived: https://www.youtube.com/embed/8MtZ3XoFQwI"frameborder="0"allowfullscreen> At first, it did not fare well to even include the black character:
Franklin owes his existence, in large part, to Harriet Glickman, a white teacher from LA, who found letter writing one of the few forms of activism in which a mother of three children—all squarely within the Peanuts demographic—could fully participate. Raised by liberal parents to consider herself a global citizen, and to speak out against injustice, she wrote the authors of several leading comic strips in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination in April, 1968. Would the creators of Peanuts and Mary Worth consider introducing a black character into the mix, as a first step on what Glickman foresaw as a “long and tortuous road” toward a future climate of “open friendship, trust and mobility” between the races? Mary Worth’s Allen Saunders declined, apparently saying that he shared Glickman’s sentiments but feared the syndicate would drop his strip if he followed her suggestion. Schulz didn’t exactly leap at the chance, either, saying that he was in the same boat as the other sympathetic cartoonists who’d begged off. What he feared wasn’t so much the syndicate’s response, as the suspicion that he might be seen as “patronizing our Negro friends.”
It gets better...
Glickman persisted, asking his permission to share his letter with some of her “Negro friends,” all parents. Perhaps they could offer some thoughts that might induce the cartoonist to say yes. One of these friends, Glickman’s neighbor, Ken Kelly, promptly fired off his own letter to Schulz, writing:I’d like to express an opinion as a Negro father of two young boys. We have a situation in America in which racial enmity is constantly portrayed.Like Glickman, he felt that a “casual day-to-day scene” featuring a non-white character would give his sons and other children of color a chance to see themselves reflected in the strip, while promoting “racial amity” to readers of all races.Glickman expressed hope that Peanuts would eventually grow to include more than one black child:
Let them be as adorable as the others…but please…allow them a Lucy! Within weeks of receiving Kelly’s letter, and just over two months into Glickman’s letter-writing campaign, Schulz reached a decision. He wrote Glickman that she should check the paper the week of July 29, 1968.July_31,_1968_Peanuts_comic Franklin, his skin tone indicated by closely set diagonal lines, made his debut in a bathing suit, returning Charlie Brown’s runaway beach ball. The encounter took three days to play out, during which Franklin and Charlie Brown form an alliance of vacationing children whose usual playmates are elsewhere. It would seem that the major difference between them is that Franklin’s dad is in Vietnam. Obviously, a lot of thought went into their casual dialogue.Benign as Franklin was, his presence sparked outrage. Some Southern readers cried foul when he showed up in the same classroom as Marcie and Peppermint Patty. Others felt Franklin wasn’t black enough. Ultimately Franklin never achieved A-list status, but he did resonate with certain readers, notably William Bell, a diversity officer working with the Cincinnati Police Department.
And while Franklin t-shirts have shown up on the racks, it was only a couple of years ago that he joined the realm of officially licensed action figures, as a Charlie Brown Christmas figurine. Visit Mashable to see reproductions of Glickman and Schulz’s correspondence. And watch the video above to hear more about her upbringing and another comic that featured black characters, Dateline: Danger!, a collaboration between Saunders’ son John and artist Al McWilliams.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now